News Clips
The Company Behind Many Surprise Emergency Room Bills
Early last year, executives at a small hospital an hour north of Spokane, Wash., started using a company called EmCare to staff and run their emergency room. The hospital had been struggling to find doctors to work in its E.R., and turning to EmCare was something hundreds of other hospitals across the country had done. That's when the trouble began. Before EmCare, about 6 percent of patient visits in the hospital's emergency room were billed for the most complex, expensive level of care. After EmCare arrived, nearly 28 percent for the highest-level billing code...
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Amazon Digital Health Talent Grab: Box Exec Reportedly Joins Team
Amazon is quietly building up its digital health tech talent, reportedly poaching a healthcare exec from Box. The Seattle behemoth may be best known for its retail business, but in the background it has a growing footprint in all manner of health technology areas. This latest Amazon talent grab appears to be another move to shore up those...
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Ok Chatbot: What Is Your Value for Humanitarians?
Whether or not you are aware of it, you have probably interacted with a chatbot – whether checking your finances, making a travel reservation, or even ordering a pizza. But what opportunities exist to use chatbots to assist humanitarians and development practitioners? Chatbots are conversational computer programs that can read message questions, interpret responses, and perform actions or make decisions, without any assistance from a live person on the other end...
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Health Tech Podcast: How One Woman Built Her Own Artificial Pancreas and Started a DIY Movement
Dana Lewis has Type 1 diabetes, which means her pancreas doesn’t work the way it should: It doesn’t make the insulin she needs to survive. So, she built a new one. It’s not a biological organ. Lewis’ artificial pancreas system (APS) is an open-source computer system that monitors her blood sugar level and gives her body insulin as needed, building on the insulin pump and glucose monitor that she’s been using for years...
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Tübingen neuroscientists develop inexpensive, self-manufactured lab equipment
Laboratory equipment is one of the largest cost factors in neuroscience. However, many experiments can be performed with good results using self-assembled setups with 3-D printed components and self-programmed electronics. The inexpensive system called “FlyPi” developed by André Maia Chagas and Tom Baden allows for many standard lab processes including light and fluorescence microscopy, optogenetics, thermogenetics, and behavioural studies in small animals (e.g. round-worms, fruit flies, zebrafish larvae)...
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Frost & Sullivan Applauds CORAnet™'s Efforts to Strengthen its Brand in the Competitive Mobile Electronic Health Record Market
Based on its recent analysis of the mobile electronic health record (EHR) market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes CORAnet™ with the 2017 North America Frost & Sullivan Award for Competitive Strategy Innovation and Leadership. CORAnet™ has emerged a successful, cloud-based mobile technology solution provider, offering first responders, doctors, and individual patients 24/7 secure access to personal health records (PHRs). Its advanced software makes possible real-time access to EHR data that is exchangeable along the entire care continuum. This capability is the result of its deep understanding of sophisticated EHR healthcare information technology, health information exchanges, mobile applications, HIPAA and MU3 compliance requirements.
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How VA Reform Turned Into a Fight Over Privatization
In 2014, the Department of Veterans Affairs was mired in a scandal. An inspector general’s report had found “systemic” manipulation by government officials to hide lengthy and growing wait times at its medical centers. Veterans were waiting months for appointments, and dozens may have died because they could not get treated in time. Spurred to action, Congress created a program aimed at temporarily alleviating the strain on the VA: Veterans who lived more than 40 miles from a health-care facility or who had to wait more than 30 days for an appointment could take their benefits outside the system and seek treatment from private doctors...
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Electronic Health Record Usability Where Art Thou?
I like to begin my articles with a little humor…no matter how little the humor. I am sure many in the User Interface community might find this joke hilarious. Not so much if you are a physician using an electronic health record (EHR) that does not provide good usability. Lack of EHR usability is one of the biggest complaints clinicians have with some currently available EHRs...So what are some of the pain points associated with EHRs that make them not user friendly? IDC Health completed a survey in 2013 to identify frequent causes of clinician EHR dissatisfaction. Of the seven dissatisfiers identified, four were associated with usability. These were...
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Opinion: See the Most Vulnerable -- See the Human Landscape
The world is currently experiencing the worst humanitarian crises since World War II. Over 20 million people are at risk of starvation and famine across Yemen, South Sudan, Nigeria and Somalia. Now entering its seventh year of conflict, the Syrian civil war rages on without an end in sight, representing the largest portion of refugees and internally displaced people globally. To be effective in helping these IDPs, relief organizations must have easy access to relevant and accurate locational data...
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What Ethical Issues Does the Precision Medicine Initiative Face?
"This is the largest government study ever on its own people.” Nancy Kass, Sc.D., a professor of bioethics and public health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, was talking about the Precision Medicine Initiative, now called the All of Us Research Program. Kass says she makes that bold statement deliberately and with humility, because she chairs the institutional review board (IRB) for the project, which aims to create a million-person cohort...
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Open Source 3-D Bioprinting Brings Houston Team One Step Closer to Growing Capillaries
In their work toward 3-D printing transplantable tissues and organs, bioengineers and scientists from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine have demonstrated a key step on the path to generate implantable tissues with functioning capillaries. In a paper published online in the journal Biomaterials Science, a team from the laboratories of Rice bioengineer Jordan Miller and Baylor College of Medicine biophysicist Mary Dickinson showed how to use a combination of human endothelial cells and mesenchymal stem cells to initiate a process called tubulogenesis that is crucial to the formation of blood-transporting capillaries...
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Customer Says eClinicalWorks Holding Patient Data 'Hostage'
As eClinicalWorks faces a possible class action lawsuit and the potential for clients to switch to rival EHR vendors, some customers are coming forward with complaints about their treatment. The company countered that it is still signing up new healthcare organizations and at least one user has noticed the vendor changing its ways. At May’s end, the U.S. Department of Justice – in a settlement that included a $155 million fine – mandated that the EHR vendor either upgrade existing customers' software for free or transfer their data to a rival’s electronic health record platform...
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Has the Internet Become an Epidemic?
It seems obvious that internet companies would calibrate their apps to keep you using them as often and as long as possible. But did you realize that these companies have become so good that your relationship with the internet has crossed from an affection to an addiction? Scientists across the globe have demonstrated that shifting the internet from our computers to our phones has created an epidemic worse than the one created by smoking, albeit attacking our minds instead of our lungs...
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Cernering the Market
After years of speculation and rumors, in a move that surprised absolutely no one, Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin announced that the Department of Veterans Affairs is moving to Cerner Millenium to replace its home-grown VistA electronic health record. On the surface this makes sense, because of DoD’s move to Cerner in 2015 and an overarching VA desire to move from custom software to COTS software. However, SecVA’s decision is only the beginning of an extremely long path, as DHA is finding with its MHS GENESIS project. Moreover, VA has a broader scope than DHA. Unlike DHA, whose primary goal is to provide a medically ready fighting force, VA handles a slew of additional tasks, including...
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How to Write Documentation That's Actually Useful
Programmers love to write code, but they hate to write documentation. Developers always want to read documentation when they inherit a project, but writing it themselves? Feh! How common is this? A recent GitHub survey found that "incomplete or outdated documentation is a pervasive problem," according to 93 percent of respondents. Yet 60 percent of contributors to the open source code repository say they rarely or never contribute to documentation. Their reasoning, for both the open source projects and their own applications? A common attitude that "documentation is for 'lusers' who don't write good code!"...
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